The present invention relates generally to embedded processing systems, and more particularly, to data driven semantic processor systems and methods of operating such semantic processors.
Conducting everyday communication and transactions through the Internet has become routine for millions of people all over the world. This has tremendously increased the volume of the data that are being transferred and processed by routers, application servers. In addition, a significant portion of the Internet traffic carries or accesses sensitive data. Carrying and accessing sensitive data adds additional burdens of managing integrity and authentication check to be performed by application severs or by some intermediate devices (e.g., application delivery devices). In addition, much of such Internet traffic happens between different machines which run different applications. As a result the application delivery device may have to transform the message so that a target application can understand the message. Traditionally, such transformation has been performed by middleware software. Adding the additional burden of the integrity check, authentication and message transformation, on an application server overloads the server and in many cases makes it impractical because the overall throughput suffers.
As a result, an acceleration device which can implement these middleware functions at the rate of the incoming data would increase the throughput.